My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t
What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next: The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
Philosophics 
Social democracy/nationalism (the current “right”) and state socialism (the current “left”) both defend centralized power. This is why we need to redefine right and left according to the principle: on the left are policies AGAINST the established power; on the right, policies FOR the established power. This is called questioning, deconstructing in order to rebuild (or not), but it causes discomfort, allergies, reluctance, and categorical refusal among the bourgeoisie. In other words, we must begin by defining what constitutes the established power. We must spend a great deal of time clearing away Benjamin’s “ruins of modernity” before finding a ruin that carries meaning; this is why I published these one to four articles on this subject (in french) :
https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2025/12/07/catademocratie-quand-le-peuple-est-instrumentalise-par-les-elites/
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This is helpful, and very much in harmony with the direction of the LIH argument. Where I’m tracing the instability of the conceptual architecture itself, you’re reminding me that much of that language functions not as description but as command – in Deleuze & Guattari’s sense of mots d’ordre.
If the vocabulary is unstable and coercive, then the universalist project collapses twice: first because meaning cannot be secured, and second because the authority encoded in the “order-word” is itself local, historical, and contingent.
Foucault and Butler likewise make this clear: moral norms are techniques of subjectivation, not windows onto a transcendental moral order. My critique works on the semantic side; theirs (and yours) on the political. Together, they reinforce the same diagnosis.
The English analytics smoke pipes; the Germans build systems; the French dissolve them. I suspect LIH sits most comfortably in the latter tradition – the strongest influence on my thinking, as I somewhat admit here: https://philosophics.blog/2025/12/05/philosophic-influences/.
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It is possible that language is inadequate for describing the world or formulating policy, since we do not primarily use it for this purpose, but rather to persuade (Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber). Could an etymological analysis demonstrate this? Could the meaning of words that has been valued and selected over time in the development of languages be the one that best allows us to “persuade” rather than engage in dialogue?
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Mercier & Sperber’s worldview may simply be too narrow, given that phatic speech appears to be the dominant use case. The social-cohesive function can still be folded into a broad persuasive model, but it doesn’t really support the argumentative thesis they favour.
As for etymology, I’m sceptical it would yield much. Most languages have no written tradition, and written corpora only capture the habits of the literate elite. Any analysis drawn from that sliver might tell us something about how scribes and priests liked to persuade each other, but it’s hardly a representative evolutionary sample. That mistakes the tip of the iceberg for the thing itself.
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Mercier and Sperber’s thesis applies only to reasoning, not to language. According to them, reasoning is used primarily to convince others. Since phatic communication is not, in itself, reasoning, but rather chatter, I was extrapolating Mercier and Sperber’s thesis from reasoning to the words used to reason… and therefore, according to Mercier and Sperber, to “convince.” You seem to limit etymology to the origin, whereas, like Nietzsche and Foucault’s (historical) genealogy, it is not necessarily the origin that is important, but the subsequent changes, ruptures, and exchanges of meaning, such as, for example, since the Enlightenment… we could take an example. I propose the word “republic.” Originally, “res publica,” meaning the public thing, a very broad definition: the republic would initially be the object of politics (the management of the city, the polis). From 1792 onward, the French Republic was proclaimed in opposition to the monarchy. It will be endowed with collective sovereignty (in reality, a distorted one) and become an anti-royalist, pro-bourgeois tool. Following the Bonapartist coups of 1799 and 1851, the meaning of “republic” takes on a new hue, that of an anti-authoritarian regime, which broadens its scope. Here are a few historical shortcuts that lead us to its current usage in our French constitution (that of the Fifth Republic, since 1958): “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social republic.” If we need to specify “indivisible, secular, democratic, and social,” what does the word “republic” mean now? Nothing. The word is now devoid of all meaning. Yet it is widely used! We have, for example, the party “The Republicans.” What does that mean? The word “republic” has become a persuasive term, meaning nothing more than a vague anti-authoritarianism used rhetorically by the nationalist conservative right. It is no longer a public entity (as it would be in the case of a people conscious of their self-governance), nor is it anti-monarchist (monarchism is no longer in vogue). Thus, its use evokes revolutionary imagery without anyone being able to define what a republic actually is. It is typically a persuasive word, with no meaning other than to enhance the thinking of the person using it. Thus, the word commonly used to designate the French regime is, in reality, an ideal. This seems to me a good example of a word used to describe the world that only has value in persuasion, and which, in reality, has no descriptive value whatsoever. A “MOT D’ORDRE,” precisely.
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Your example of republic is a good illustration of genealogical drift, but it actually reinforces the point I was making: genealogy reveals how a term accumulates power, ambiguity, and rhetorical charge over time, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the evolutionary function of language or its earliest pressures.
Mercier & Sperber confine their thesis to reasoning, yes, but once we extend it to language, we hit the problem I flagged earlier: most linguistic behaviour isn’t reasoning at all, and most linguistic communities left no written record. If we base our analysis on literate elites (those who wrote constitutions, inscriptions, speeches), then the genealogical method will naturally yield a persuasive, political vocabulary… because that’s the sample we’re forced to observe.
So the genealogy of republic demonstrates how a term becomes a mot d’ordre through political history, but it doesn’t settle the question of whether language as such evolved for persuasion. It shows how political concepts are co-opted and hollowed, not how proto-language functioned.
In other words:
Genealogy is excellent for tracing rhetorical accretions in literate cultures; it’s far weaker as evidence for the origins of language, where phatic coordination, self-organisation, and non-verbal scaffolding were likely dominant.
So yes, republic today functions almost purely as a persuasive signal – a floating signifier with revolutionary perfume and no referent. But that tells us more about modern political rhetoric than about the evolutionary pressures shaping pre-speech cognition.
The term’s emptiness is a feature of its political history, not evidence that language itself originated as persuasion.
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I don’t assume that language originated from, or stems from, the need to persuade. I presuppose that Mercier and Sperber’s thesis is correct and that the most widespread mode of exchange in our reasoning is literary. Literature based on text. Thus, by analyzing the words constituting texts with an etymological-genealogical method, we can determine whether the current meaning of a word is used to persuade or to describe. Indeed, the further back in time we go, the more descriptive words we should find. This is due to ancient wisdom. The difficulty of the demonstration would lie more in the very localized effect of a demonstration. At the same time, I am trying to connect these ideas to the inadequacy of language, to Blanchot’s fog.
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A Lighthearted But Hopefully Semi-Intelligent Response to Bry Willis’ Review of My Book
Time for a response.
As Bry indicated in his review, he and I were once colleagues and have enjoyed exchanging views on a range of topics. And I humbly yield to his superior knowledge of philosophy given that my resume includes only one survey course in college, now almost fifty years ago. My sole recollections from said course are “Don’t let Descartes come before the horse” and “I think, therefore eye yam.” It still confuses me why that argument holds true, although I do enjoy a good sweet potato from time to time.
I am an intellectual conservative, born of writers such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, and Thomas Sowell. I earned a B.A. in economics and an MBA in finance from two prestigious schools followed by a successful 31-year business career and a decade teaching college economics and business.
I have also been an observer of the political scene since 1968 when, as a 12-year-old, I watched Mayor Daley’s finest pummel and arrest protestors outside of the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. In short, I have spent my life loading my brain with facts, experiences, and principles. This background gives me the ability to view and analyze political pronouncements and actions through a wide variety of lenses: economic, marketing, management, biblical, financial, psychological, etc.
Now to Bry’s critique. He begins by complaining that the title of my book, “Why Democrats Are Dangerous,” telegraphs my intentions too cleanly. To that, I plead guilty. Over a million books are published each year, and my understanding of marketing principles informed me that I had to make my book stand out. I am fully aware that not ALL Democrats are dangerous. However, a more precise title along the lines of “Why the Extreme Progressive Elements of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party Leaders Who Kowtow to Them in Order to Cobble Together a Majority Coalition and Not Be Primaried Out of Office Are Dangerous” would be a bit unwieldy and a challenge for search engines.
Bry tries to position himself as an unbiased, all-knowing oracle, floating above the fray of us mere mortals, saying “I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes.” His social media behavior would indicate otherwise, since he frequently likes and reposts anti-Trump content, much of it devoid of serious thought. He also seems to bounce back and forth between washing his hands of the whole mess – “It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions” – and arguing vigorously against anyone who wants to take a clear stand on one side or the other: in this case, me.
He decries the fact that I have engaged in an Enlightenment fantasy, having formed and expressed a worldview that I believe to be true. I clearly have a worldview, but one that has been shaped by fifty-eight years of observation, thought, and analysis. I understand that disagreements between the two parties are not one of pure evil versus pure good. In fact, I write in my introduction that “Republican leaders are also guilty of many of the transgressions listed in this book.”
In the real world, however, worldviews clash and both leaders and voters need to make decisions, even when uncertainty and mutual failure are acknowledged. We cannot move forward if mired in the perpetual goo of anti-Enlightenment ambiguity. Bry decries the certainty of my arguments but never states whether or not he thinks I actually made my case, i.e., that Democrats are dangerous. For example, Democrats do, in fact, overwhelmingly control the educational establishment in the United States and use this to advance their philosophies. Is no one allowed to identify this potential danger?
Again exposing his supposedly non-existent partisanship, Bry repeatedly rails against Republicans, stating that they are EVEN MORE dangerous! To analogize, I think we can agree that both grizzly bears and rattlesnakes are dangerous. But if I’m an ophiologist, I’m permitted to warn people about poisonous snakes biting them without comparing them to the bears’ desire to eat them. At this point, I’d like to apologize for comparing Democrats to snakes. Sorry, snakes.
Bry cries for a more nuanced, balanced discussion, disparaging my inability to perceive symmetry as well as my reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. Again drawing on marketing principles, I wrote this book with three clear target audiences in mind: 1) High school and college students who are trying to understand the current political scene, 2) Democrats who are starting to question their party, and 3) people new to the Republican party who might not yet understand the breadth and history of Democratic tactics and strategies. I taught college for 10 years and understand that today’s student is highly unlikely to read a highly researched, properly footnoted, 4-volume set that presents a scholarly analysis of our two parties and their relative degree of sinfulness. Ditto my other two target audiences. My approach, then, was to present my experience and concept based worldview in a clearly organized, concise, comprehensive, compelling manner.
And, of course, being exposed to one worldview does not prevent a reader from seeking out other worldviews and making his or her own judgement. Clearly the opposing view – that Republicans, especially the orange one, are REALLY dangerous – is readily available on the mainstream media, social media, or your favorite online bookstore.
A recent Amazon search for “Books on Donald Trump” results in a header titled “Books that expose the threat to American freedom” with a collection of books underneath including one titled “Trump the ‘Dick’tator”. Other books on page 1 include “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control,” “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” and “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims, and Flat-Out Lies.” I’m guessing that all of these authors would also fail Bry’s litmus test, believing that “one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth.”
Bry accuses me of creating “an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature.” He also states that “The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it.” Again, he is putting Descartes before the horse. The book presents example after example of Democratic failures in thought, policies, and actions. I did not pre-condemn Democrats, they condemned themselves. I did not enter my twelfth year presupposing Democratic treachery, they convinced me of it over a lifetime.
Finally, he argues that “every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour.” That’s just not true. Republicans do not control the teachers’ unions. Republicans did not cancel people for politically incorrect speech. Republicans did not argue to pack the Supreme Court, Republicans did not open the borders and ignore federal immigration law, Republicans did not impeach Joe Biden, Republicans did not force women’s sports to accept transgenders, etc., etc., etc.
Well, I think that about covers it. Plus, my yam souffle is almost done.
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Drew, thank you for taking the time to respond. I want to be clear about where our disagreement actually sits, because at present we appear to be talking past one another. You are arguing about the orientation of the deck chairs, and I am arguing that the ship is sinking irrespective of this activity, so in triaging, I’m not willing to discuss at this level.
My critique was not about your sincerity, your experience, your effort, or your intent. Nor was it a dispute over whether particular policies, cultural trends, or institutional behaviours exist. It was an ontological critique: a claim about how you are grouping phenomena, not which phenomena you cite. My point is that you are arguing from within a silo and offering your book to the choir. I understand the commercial aspects of this decision. I did read the book cover-to-cover. It just doesn’t resonate with me on a deeper level. To me, it read as a one-sided, and therefore, superficial polemic.
Specifically, I argued that your book repeatedly treats ‘Democrats’ as if they were a single, coherent psychological agent—endowed with unified intention, strategy, moral character, and foresight. That is a category error. Political parties are not minds; they are heterogeneous, internally conflicted coalitions. Aggregating disparate actors, institutions, and outcomes into a singular moral subject is not analysis, however many examples are supplied. This is why I chose not to engage the content.
Responding with additional examples, personal history, or claims of sharper observational skill does not address that problem. Experience does not license reification. One may observe a system for decades and still misattribute agency to abstractions. The issue is structural, not evidentiary.
You also repeatedly position me within the binary you are operating inside, despite my explicit refusal to occupy either camp. That move itself is illustrative. A framework that cannot recognise orthogonal critique will inevitably interpret analysis as opposition. But not all criticism is counter-polemical, and not all disagreement signals allegiance to the other tribe.
You point out the number of times I make a negative comment about Trump without also noting the negative comments I have made about Obama, Biden, and Harris, all of which are as superficial. You also appear to conflate Trump with Republicans and Conservatism, when in fact these connexions are unfounded. I have many Republican friends who are horrified with the direction Trump has steered their party away from Burkean conservatism.
Finally, I agree that one can argue I am mistaken. One could show that my symmetry claims fail, that my interpretation mischaracterises behaviour, or that my ontological concerns are misplaced. Those would be substantive rebuttals. What does not advance the discussion is dismissing the critique as bias by another name, or reframing it as a disagreement over tone, aesthetics, or biography.
We disagree at the level of how political reality should be conceptualised. Until that is acknowledged, no amount of examples on either side will resolve the impasse.
On the upside, I’ve research and written several more pieces specifically on ontological architectures, not only in politics but in language more generally, because this divide is more structural than personal. Still, ad hominems prevail – not in bad faith, but still as misguided.
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Time for a response…. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/drew-baker-wdad_response-to-brys-review-activity-7407084294826901504-QhVK?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACz-hYBr-25gfjhUd82-b1giALb1gJ3Tgg
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